


More Than Enough

by Potboy



Category: Stargate Universe
Genre: Gen, Not Really Character Death, lots of talking apparently, pre-slash or pre-friendship take your pick, what would Young do with two Rushes?, will write for cookies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-25
Updated: 2014-05-02
Packaged: 2018-01-20 18:06:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1520225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Potboy/pseuds/Potboy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two Rushes is too much for anyone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“Good job, Lieutenant. I'll take it from here.”

Scott nods, white faced, white lipped, and turns to leave. Young can't tell if that's anger or fear. Same thing really, in this case. Apparently he had to club Rush #2 over the head and physically drag him away from the chair, with the ship falling into the sun around them and Rush #1 arguing with him all the way back. Arguing that he should be allowed to fry his other self's brains out, because it was his life, his decision, his desire.

They're lucky any of them made it back, let alone all.

Without too much hesitancy, Scott closes the door behind him, leaves the three of them alone. Young's happy about that, glad that Scott at least is starting to trust him again.

His Rush, Rush #1...

He pauses that thought to consider it better. Considered chronologically, his Rush is probably Rush #2, younger by 12 hours than his scarred counterpart. If Young has this right, they are all version #2 except for the Rush who is sitting shivering in the corner of his sofa like a bird in an Arctic breeze, and the Telford who has made it to Earth. His Telford is the one Scott found dead, steaming, with his internal organs cooked, on the floor of alternate Destiny.

Things they don't tell you about time travel – how you'll feel when your old friend gets duplicated and then one of the pair gets killed. Young doesn't know if he should be half angry or wholly confused, but there's something quiet in him that says one David is plenty, and he's going with that.

His Rush... Fuck it.  _Rush_ glares at him, chin up, knives in his eyes and a kind of restless, prickly energy about him that might be fear but looks more like shame. “We knew you wouldn't believe us when we said it was an accident. And given my previous experiences of your regime it didn't seem unreasonable to expect a death sentence. Why not help myself to choose my own?”

Rush of course wouldn't trust Young as far as he could throw him. Would literally rather kill himself than try.

“No, I get that,” he says and moves away from his desk. He doesn't want to look official. Like most conversations with Rush, this is outside all the structures and the safeguards they've tried to bring with them from Earth. He doesn't know if that's comforting or not, but that's just how it is.

Looking away from Rush's accusations, he concentrates on the man who came off Destiny's shuttle, an emotional wreck shattered by the deaths of the crew. The man whose depths of broken mourning have opened Young's eyes to the fact that he does care after all. The guy he's decided to call  _Nick_ .

“You thought you deserved to die, so you wanted to do it by hooking yourself up to Destiny. Maybe you'd never know who built the universe, but you'd know so much else. At least for a second. I get it. The thought of death can be...” Like a thirst. Like a constant low level physical pain that you can ignore when you've got something to work on. But at night... at night when everything else is quiet it crawls out of the cracks and becomes the whole world. “A comfort.”

“Oh please,” Rush makes a disgusted hand gesture, brushing aside morbidity and weakness. He didn't live through it, he isn't broken open, he hasn't seen what Nick has seen inside himself. Or if he has he wants to keep it hidden. “Let's just get the thrashing over with and move on. I presume that's why you sent Scott away, yes? If it's not death you intend for him then I imagine it's a punishment beating. Just leave his hands intact, he'll need them if I'm to put him to work.”

Nick goes sharp as a blade of glass, leaves off hugging his knees and puts his feet on the floor. “Well, thank you for that. Nice of you to put the idea in his head. And if you think I'm working for you you've got another think coming. I was here first.”

“And look how much good you did,” Rush leans forward and hisses it in his own face. It's fascinating to watch, but Nick has been through bereavement and abandonment, some kind of altercation with Telford that lead to Telford's death, and a subsequent suicide attempt. He's unravelling like he did in the dark, and Young can't watch that a second time without intervening earlier.

“Rush-”

“You let them die. All of them. You let your Destiny die. You don't get to come here and take mine.”

“ _Rush_ !”

Both of them fix him with the same indignant glare. Maybe he's not supposed to interrupt their weird external internal monologues, but although it's informative to know that Rush is as merciless to himself as he is to the rest of them, it's not helping.

“You actually see what happened with David?” he asks, hoping to derail this for a different time.

Rush sobers at once, shakes his head. Then he does that thing he did just before he asked Young to stay behind with him, that kind of internal brace and drop, like he's pushing himself off a high dive board. It's what Rush looks like when he's trying to be honest.

“But you of all people should know that...”

Young nods because he's had this thought too. “If there was a fight, it wouldn't have been you that started it.”

That's not strictly true. Rush's MO is to start it with words, to needle and taunt until his opponent loses it and hits him. This proves Rush is the better man. He retains the moral high ground, and he gains the upper hand of the martyr. It's a game of nerve in which Rush is the aggressor, but technically,  _technically_ it would have been David who struck first, David who escalated it from shouting match to something deadlier.

Young closes his eyes and bows his face into his hands for a moment. He sighs in the dark of his cupped palms.

“He shoved me,” says Nick, unexpectedly. His restless fingers have been prying up the band-aid over the burn on his cheek, making it bleed. Young's spoken to TJ about that. She says it will scar on its own. There's no need to put a couple of stitches in to hold it closed and incidentally mark him for life. She'd looked displeased that he'd raised the subject, but somebody had to.

“Telford accused me of ruining the dial home – as though I could possibly have  _wanted_ any of this – he shoved me and I shoved back.” Nick is looking away, looking delicate, and that's just wrong, because Nicholas Rush in any time line should never look anything less than dangerous.

“There was a live cable. I know you won't believe me, but I didn't mean...”

Rush heads for the door with an eyeroll and a little inhalation of breath that says he's disgusted to share DNA with anyone so weak. Young meets him there because even though he thinks Nick is the softer touch right now, Rush is his. This has got to be weird enough for Rush without playing second best to himself.

Rush gestures him to step into the corridor, closes Young's own door behind him. Ever since they made their gentlemen's agreement on the deserted spaceship, Rush has had these flashes of treating Young as if they're confidantes, and it would be touching, delightful even, if half the time he wasn't positive he was going to disappoint.

“You should have let him die,” Rush says, earnestly, with the innocent certainty he tends to use when suggesting Young should murder someone.

Young's kneejerk reaction of horror over this has been steadily wearing thin for over a year now. He can't remember how it felt when it used to take his breath away. “You kidding? I'd have thought you'd be glad. Finally you have someone on board who's on your own level. Someone you can trust.”

Face angled towards the bulkhead, Rush breathes out a snort of amusement. His gaze accuses Young of unbelievable naivety or worse. “Right. Yes, it's lovely. I'm truly going to enjoy fighting with him for control of my team, for access to his data, for possession of my own quarters and my own name. While all the time you're thinking how nice it is to have a spare. Because now you have one that can be left behind. Doubtless, you'll keep us competing for which one it should be.”

Young knows better, but he can't help it. He wants to say something along the lines of  _I made a promise to myself I would never abandon you again, and besides, I'm kind of getting to like you,_ but that's not the sort of thing he could ever force into words. It comes out as an elbow clasp that makes Rush startle and recoil.

“If he wants to live he has the right to live.”

Rush shakes his head, but oddly does not tear his arm out of Young's grip. “He doesn't even belong in this universe.”

“But he's here.”

“Yes, and if you had left it up to both of us we would have corrected that for you by now.”

Rush always looks hungry, hungry and belligerent, like there's never enough to go round and if he doesn't fight for it he'll be left to starve. That's not such an unreasonable assumption on this ship where they're one meal ahead of crisis on a good day. It's like he thinks there's barely enough room on Destiny for one Rush, and he's going to have to make sure it goes to him.

If Nick has the same attitude – which, lets face it, he probably does – this is a massive fuck-up in waiting. But what the hell does Rush expect him to do about it? He's not going to tell either of them they need to die.

“We'll just have to learn to get along with him.” He shrugs, pretending that it's going to be that easy, while he remembers what one Rush is capable of when it comes to suborning the crew and taking over the ship and running life-threatening experiments on the science staff. Two of them, using the ship as a battleground? Lying to him about what each of them is up to so as to score points off each other? Yeah, that's going to be great.

This is exactly the kind of thing that made him think that one Rush was too many.

He smiles and gives Rush's elbow a reassuring squeeze, because he's glad he changed his mind about that. “We'll work something out,” he says. “It'll be fine.”

“Oh, I'm so reassured.” But Rush returns the smile with something lop-sided and sickle-sharp. There's a fleeting moment of fellow-feeling between them before Rush dismisses him with a handwave and walks off. Then Young opens his door and goes in to have the whole conversation over again with Nick.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Young and Nick exercise that famous tact of theirs.

Rush can't help it, he's raw at the moment and in even less control of this stupid irrational bag of flesh in which he's encased than he is at the best of times. So he forgives himself for pressing back into the corner of the sofa when Young comes in, trailing flashes of dust and abandonment and cold ancient metal at his back.

Young looks at him, stops in his tracks. There's an impasse - too long - while they observe each other. And it strikes him with an odd pang of loss that this is not his Young. Not the one who stood next to him and made that little speech about staying. Literally one sentence, with no informational content whatsoever, and it had swayed the crowd like a revelation. He doesn't know how Young does that, but he's beginning to think it might be a useful skill, at least in any profession that involves interacting with people on a day to day basis.

It's not one he even knows how to start acquiring, so he comes straight out and asks it plain. "Is it to be a beating then?"

It hasn't escaped his notice that his other self got to Young first. That he is the afterthought in this conversation. It doesn't fill him with confidence over how his future is going to shape up.

"Do I look angry?"

Rush humours the non-sequiteur. "You never do."

Which makes Young step back, puts a furrow of thought on his forehead. Was he angry, then, when he beat Rush up before? He hadn't looked it - that was half of the problem. Rush knows where he stands with men like Greer and Telford, whose annoyance ramps up smoothly from shouting to shoving, where he can observe to exactly what pitch he has wound them and when it's better to back off.

The picture of Telford dead, with bleeding eyes and smoking hands recurs unwanted. He pinches his eyes closed against it. Very well, perhaps his management of conflict is not quite as fine tuned as he hoped. But the point - the point was that while Young's anger is all threat display and roaring, his violence comes straight out of quiet faced calm. Rush had always imagined it to be tactical, deliberate, the product of thought rather than emotion.

"Oh," Young says, as though this idea is new to him. He sits on the edge of his desk, looking uncomfortable. "Okay then. But I'm not. I figure whatever happened you've probably been punished enough."

Rush hasn't been punished at all. Which - while it suits him perfectly well - also seems unjust. He's not going to mourn Simeon's death, the bastard had it coming, but Telford? For all their disagreements, the man was a colleague whom he had at times almost respected. Merciless bastard that he was.

He relaxes his wound up, springlike posture a little. Risks shuffling to the edge of the seat, shifting his weight as if he's about to stand up.

It's not that he wants to be punished, but...

"Well in that case I'll be going back to my work."

But it would get it over with and done. Plus, he would feel better about Young's competence if the man wasn't such a bloody doormat.

Another flash. Another dead man, God they pile up. Now he's remembering that scientist of Kiva's, whose neck she had broken because Rush mislead her about the quality of the man's work. Young is a doormat - sometimes. Not all the time. He's inconsistent and difficult to deal with, weak followed by strong at unpredictable intervals. For a long time Rush had wished Young would be more powerful, more ruthless - a better commander - but Kiva was that, and Rush found in her case that he didn't much like it after all.

"Not yet." Young gestures him to sit down again. "First, I'm going to suggest to Camile you should be allowed to take at least a week off."

"I don't want time off." This is a blatant attempt to allow this universe's copy of him to hide his data and talk the ship around to his side before Rush can establish his position.

Young shrugs, like he's not already chosen his side. "You could swap bodies with McKay, spend some time catching up on the latest research--"

"My consciousness is going nowhere," Rush insists, because death - the prospect of death, all that time spent in the shuttle alone in the vastness of space contemplating loss and death and failure - all of that has sharpened his vision immensely. He knows what he wants now, and he hasn't got time for distractions like Earth. "Unless you intend to force this holiday on me at gun point?"

Young leans his weight back on his bent arms and says nothing for a while. Thinking, no doubt.

"Nick--"

"Nick?" Rush mocks. "Who gave you permission to call me Nick?"

With both hands, Young smooths back the increasing mess of his hair. He looks typically impassive but maybe that's anger? Maybe it's something else. Rush can't tell.

"The other Rush is our Rush," Young says. "Now, you can be Nick or you can be something else of your own choice, but 'Rush' is taken. You can't be that."

It's a fucking assault. It's one of the worst things Young's ever done to him and that's saying something. "I _am_ Rush."

A mild look, slow and implacable as the advance of a glacier. "Not in this universe."

They made a pact. Young had unexpectedly fought him to a standstill. Unexpectedly survived everything Rush had thrown at him. Unexpectely reacted to the mission as though he understood, as though they could be allies instead of enemies, as though Rush wasn't as entirely alone on board as he had thought.

And now that's dead along with his Young.

He takes it back. Fucking Telford deserves every fucking thing that happened, every sodding volt. He ruined everything.

"I suppose my quarters..?" he's fuming like there's a live current whipping through him too.

"You're going to have to choose different ones."

Gloria's photo is under the mattress. It's under the mattress in 'Rush's' quarters. He didn't go back for it on his Destiny. It hadn't occurred that he ought to until too late. Which is, when you think about it, rather appropriate really. His chin tries to crumple. He keeps it solid with fury.

"Well, thank you for that. You've made it quite plain where I stand in this crew. I saved your lives--"

"Yeah. I'm thankful to you, believe it or not, but..."

He doesn't believe it for a moment.

"But you got to live with us now. And that means you got to work with our Rush. It should be good, right. Two of you, you can cover twice as much ground. But that means not taking stuff away from our Rush, because he's not going to stand for that."

There is a hint of rationality in what Young is saying, which frankly just makes it even more infuriating. He knew the universe wasn't big enough for them both. He knew it, that was why... That was why it was important that he got to the chair first.

Young, with typical self-obsession, thinks he was trying to kill himself, because that was what Young would have done in his place. The man has no imagination. And to be fair he also doesn't have all the facts. Naturally his conclusions are faulty.

"If you could work with Rush," Young's frowning at him now, as though he can tell there's plotting going on and he doesn't like the look of it, "just imagine how fantastic it would be for the ship. I know you and I don't see eye to eye, but we both want what's best for Destiny, right? And you and Rush in some kind of galactic cage fight - that's not going to turn out well for anyone."

"You're appealing to my better nature?" This time he does get up, heads for the door, walking out of a conversation he doesn't want to have any more.

Young doesn't attempt to stop him. "I guess."

“How very sweet. I wasn't aware that you thought I had one."


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Young outsources his worries to Eli.

The upside of the situation is that it's kind of cool in several geeky ways. Eli rubs at his tired eyes, goes back to squinting at the code. He's scarcely reading it any more - just watching for patterns. If something's important, chances are it will leap out at him before his conscious mind has a chance to guess why.

Anyway, like he was saying - to himself, because here he is, yet again, bleary eyed and monitor-headached, shut in his own room alone - it is kind of cool.

First of all there's the whole 'wow, duplicate people from different universes' factor. Which, you have to face it, is a neat trope. Although it's turning out to be less entertaining in real life. Lots less.

Secondly, and probably related, is the fact that Colonel Young has put the ship on a three watch system that goes back to 18th Century sailing ships. They have enough trained bridge crew now to make sure someone's manning all the stations, someone's manning the armoury and someone's manning the gateroom at all times. Four hours on, four hours off, except for 'dog watches' where everyone has time to congregate in the mess for food.

The official gen is that this is to make sure that Destiny is never caught napping with all its personnel asleep at once. Privately, Eli's pretty sure it's also been intended as a way of keeping the two Rushes apart - making sure that none of the crew ever has to deal with more than one of them at once.

After that time when both Rushes lost their shit around Andrew Covel, who not only semi-accused them of lying about the mission but also said that, since one of them was a spare, his body could be used to host visiting scientists from Earth on a semi-permanent basis, keeping the pair of them apart must have seemed like a great idea. 

(In retrospect, the shouting match had been pretty funny, but at the time Eli had been too worried about his mom to appreciate it.)

Anyway, what was he thinking? Oh yes. Three watch system, like something out of Pirates of the Caribbean. With Doctor Rush and Rush on different watches so that never the twain will meet. You've got to admit that's kind of geeky-cool, all this way away from the tall ships in distance and in time. It's got that Hornblower vibe of men all alone against a terrible ocean, with the wind in their hair and the ruffles of their shirts gently blowing. The Destiny even has her own ex-pirates on board, which is even cooler. 

Or it would be, it would be... if Ginn was still one of them.

That's a whole world of guilt and regret Eli can't afford to visit right now. Besides, it sucks. To avoid being pulled right back into that hole, he pinches the bridge of his nose and refocusses on the code.

There's a knock on his door frame that he barely hears through the nth repetition of 'Bad Romance' - what? He liked the Star Trek fan-vid, OK? He pulls out his ear plugs and glances at Colonel Young, who is leaning against the doorway like he needs the wall to prop him up.

Here's a funny thing. Under the three watch system, Eli and the Colonel are what they call 'Idlers' - which means they don't have to stand a watch. It should mean they get to sleep in in the morning put in a 9-5 work day and have evenings and nights to themselves. Sweet, right? In practice it means that they're on call _all the time_. If they're asleep when some crisis hits, they just get woken up to deal with it. Eli doesn't know what he looks like himself, but Col. Young looks pretty rough.

“Eli,” Young says, with that little smile Eli gets from him a lot – the one that Eli figures means 'you and me, we're in this together.' “How's it going?”

“Five minutes...” He's just got to get to the end of the last hundred lines. Everything goes quiet as he does so, and when he reaches the final file and is able to toggle off the display, he finds Young settled into patient stillness with a stiffness about his face that suggests he's stifling a yawn. “OK, shoot. I mean, don't _shoot_ me, obviously. But... um.”

“No, I get that, Eli.” Young sounds exasperated but his smile has broadened. “So, you had a chance to figure out what's going on with the Rushes?”

After the whole framing people for murder and taking over the ship and not telling anyone he was the reason the blue aliens were able to track them, planting false information in the database, telling everyone the General had put him in charge of things... and, in fact, after landing everyone here in the first place, Eli could see why Young had first felt the need to keep tabs on what Rush was up to, but it had been good when he'd let it lapse.

Eli's jury is still out on the question of whether he'd let it go because he'd decided to trust Rush somewhat, or he'd just let it lapse because he couldn't find the energy to care any more. So it's maybe 50/50 a good thing if he's picking it back up again.

“You know I was kind of liking the whole 'lets not spy on our colleagues' deal,” he says, in a protest that feels pretty weak and tokenish even to him.

“You kidding? You snoop for fun, Eli. I might as well put that to use.”

Well, that's... probably fair. Eli concedes the point. But it's for his documentary, which is going to be awesome, and they're all going to be glad of it in the end. 

He also internally concedes the point that with two Rushes about, plotting against each other, picking the surveillance up again is probably wise. “O...kay then. But it's nothing too suspicious, if that's what you're asking.”

“I hear the watches idea is not working out.”

Eli laughs. “They both ignore whatever watch they're supposed to be on and work round the clock anyway. _Luckily_ they're also both kind of weirdly secretive about what they're up to, so after the first week - when they kept wanting to work on the same things at the same time - they're mostly avoiding each other by choice now.”

“OK,” Young finally comes in, sits down on Eli's unmade bed and leans forward, elbows on his knees. “That's good. That's... better than I hoped. What are they working on?”

Eli isn't sure when he became Young's man. He shouldn't be. He knows that. Right from the start it was supposed to be some kind of competition or standoff between military and civilians, jarheads and scientists. That was how Camile had phrased it, like they didn't have more important things to worry about, like they weren't all human beings in this dangerous situation together. Maybe it's just that Young has never done that – never drawn lines that didn't have to be there. Or maybe it was the way, all that time ago on Icarus, Rush simultaneously used and despised him, while Young was the one who remembered he needed to eat.

The way to a video game slacker's heart is through his stomach, after all.

That's not to say he doesn't increasingly like Rush – Eli makes an effort to like everyone – but yeah, loyalty wise he chose his side early on. Not even some severe – really, really fucking severe, I'm not joking – disappointments have changed that.

Besides, anyone could go into the kino feeds and the computer records and figure this stuff out. He's not exactly betraying confidences here. He rolls his chair back and gathers his thoughts. “Well, Rush – our Rush, you know – is working on the countdown clock, trying to figure out the principles behind the amounts of time we're given at any planet, and whether we can change that. He's also been working on a patch to allow us to more directly pick planets along our path that meet our resource needs, and to red-flag the known dangers before we walk into them.”

“Sounds good. All stuff we need. And?”

Maybe Eli could attach kinos to his chair? The kino sled idea has proved unexpectedly practical, and never got a chance to amount to the awesome Silver Surfer toy he'd originally intended, but whizzing round the ship in a floating chair sounds fun. He hooks a foot under his desk and rolls himself close again.

“And,” he admits, “he's been encrypting a whole bunch of the database that he originally decrypted and sequestering other parts of it under heavy firewalls, while he's also been writing a whole bunch of programs to go over and query the database about what Doctor Rush is up to.”

“What is Doctor Rush – that's Nick, right? The one from the future? - What _is_ he up to?”

“That's a little more interesting,” Eli flicks the monitor through to a recording of Doctor Rush in the chair room, up to his elbows in cables. “He's concentrating on the communication stones and the chair.”

Young rubs at the crease between his brows, where it looks like life has hammered him in the head repeatedly. “The chair? He went for the chair on alternate Destiny too. You think he's still trying to kill himself?”

If there's a man less likely to kill himself than Rush – either Rush – Eli hasn't met one. He's shocked at the idea. “No. No, I don't think that. He's being really careful with it.”

“He better had.” Young's voice goes dark, and it's clear enough they're both thinking about Franklin.

“He really is,” Eli hastens to add. “And nobody's going to take the risk of sitting in it now on Rush's say so – unless they're being taken over by freaky aliens and really really trust Rush... or something. Not that that was kind of a specific example of when it worked out OK, or anything. What I mean is you don't have to worry. Nobody's going to be sitting in that thing in future unless they're 100% sure it's safe.”

“Eli,” Young gives him a 'sheesh, simmer down' look. “It's OK. I don't have a problem with him using the chair unless he's trying to trick anyone else into it, or trying to use it to blow out his own brains. I just wonder what he _is_ hoping to achieve.”

Eli puts his hands behind his head and stretches the kinks out of his back. Ten minutes 'til lunch, and although the food is awful, it'll be a relief to have the constant grinding ache of hunger quieted for a while. “Me, I'd use it to make all that database searching faster. I mean, if you could just think  _what's the safe route to the closest source of canned apple pie_ and have the ship give you the answer like,” he waves both hands in illustration, “as naturally as communicating with your own arms and legs, then that would solve like 99.9% of our problems straight off.”

“So Nick's also doing useful work and I don't need to be concerned?”

Eli thinks about the encryptions and protections in place around Doctor Rush's work, which would take him more effort than he can contemplate investing in order to crack. Thinks about how hard their Rush is trying to break through those walls, and about the faint sense he gets from Doctor Rush that he has had it with them all – that he's the only real person on board, living in a house of ghosts.

“I... wouldn't go that far,” he says reluctantly. “He _could_ be figuring out a way to bypass the bridge entirely and put himself mentally in control of the whole ship. After which he'll be able to finish the mission on his own and he won't need any of us any more.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which nothing I planned to happen actually happens, but we reach the end anyway.

Rush gets there as fast as he can, bowling intolerable nuisances down as they fail to get out of his way in the corridors. But he's further out from the crew quarters, and by the time he arrives – panting, elated, terrified – it is to find _Nick_ holding Chloe's hands, while she looks at him with the starry-eyed wonder that is Amanda Perry. Not lost after all.

She is not lost after all.

“Oh,” her head tilts towards him, delicate, fragile, very unlike Chloe's yoga-inspired grace, and her expression takes on a wonder underlain by the fierce curiosity that he loves. “There are two of you.”

“I came back from the future to save them all, but found myself stranded here,” says _Nick_ , bending the facts to make himself sound like some kind of hero.

“He's an accident of temporal flux,” Rush corrects, closing the last distance between them and reaching out. “I'm contiguous with this timeline. By which I mean, I'm the real Rush.”

_Nick_ scoffs and doesn't move away, but Mandy frees a hand from his grasp and closes it around Rush's, and he would swear – irrational though it might be – that he can feel her soul in there. The brightness and brilliance of it shines through Chloe's flesh like billions of nebulae.

He has her right hand and  _Nick_ has her left. After the man has spent the last few weeks trying to take away from him everything he loves, it's an effort to brace himself and raise his head and actually look  _Nick_ in the eye. But he does it for her.

“She can't stay like this.”

“No,” _Nick_ agrees. They have a truce now, easy as that, confronted with a problem whose parameters are so clear to both of them. “There might be a way of boosting the signal. I've been doing some work on the communication stones... But then you'd know all about that, with your spyware.”

“You can't just boost Dr. Perry's signal and leave Ginn's to decay!”

That's a voice he hadn't expected. He focusses outward a little and realizes he's the centre of something of a crowd. Eli stands angrily by Chloe's right hand, Scott by her left. In a separate little nexus of their own over by the doorway Young and TJ are watching everything with identical looks of concern.

Eli is being selfish as usual. Rush tries to reach him with the voice of reason. “If we boost Ginn's signal that will only make the choking episodes worse.”

“Ginn's fading out,” Eli insists, sounding desperate, and please, the boy barely knew her. A few weeks. It's nothing in comparison to the years of friendship and respect he's shared with Mandy. “We'll lose her.”

Scott opens his mouth to protest, but it's TJ who gets there first. “The choking incidents are endangering Chloe. They may be second hand memories but they cause the same physical reactions in her system as if it was happening to her. Massive release of stress hormones, her blood pressure rockets, her blood-oxygen falls, her heart labours and her brain is starved. This is why people die at both ends of a connection. We'll lose all three of them if we don't act soon.”

Young nods, like _he_ never put the whole ship in danger because he wanted to save his friend, like he never mucked up the hostage exchange because he couldn't stand seeing TJ take a risk. And didn't _that_ turn out well?

“If it looks like she's going into another episode, I'm cutting the connection.”

Bastard.

Rush waits. He has hacked into Eli's kino feed over the last few weeks and has been watching  _Nick_ subject the chair to painstaking examination. He's waiting for  _Nick_ to make the suggestion, to sacrifice some of his precious secrecy over his work. But  _Nick_ doesn't. They stare each other down as Mandy blinks out and it's Ginn there, just an impudent little girl with an itchy trigger finger, about whose fate he is not greatly concerned.

But he also cares about Chloe. He breaks  _Nick_ 's silence with a sense of being the better man. “We might be able to isolate each personality using the neural interface chair. Upload Mandy and Ginn into Destiny's computer. Put Chloe back in possession of her own body and have the option of downloading the others again should an appropriate form become available.”

Young looks at him, and it's inappropriate to feel a savage stab of satisfaction over the fact that Young trusts him more than he trusts  _Nick_ , but that isn't stopping him. He nods in an effort to convey sincerity, as  _Nick_ – just that instant too late to sound natural – adds “That could work.”

“OK then,” says Young easily. “Let's do that.”

~

Later, when Chloe is recovered, and TJ has told everyone that Mandy helped her with Volker's liver transplant, Rush seeks out Young in his room. He's feeling uncharacteristically happy, floating on the knowledge that Mandy is back. Also, he has an immense, thirsty curiosity about what she is now. What is it like for her as a being made entirely of code run on mechanical software, part human and part spaceship?

Once he has finished today's work on the sublight engines, he means to award himself a day off, to go and find out, and it feels like he's pushed a boulder off his ribs, he's so giddy with relief. Perhaps that's why he finds he has a great desire to be useful, to lighten someone else's day to match his own. Young, who is always miserable, will do for that.

Young's gaze goes first to Rush's cheek as he saunters through the open door. He's become quite used to that since  _Nick'_ s been around, but every time he wonders if there's some way of making a false scar. He doesn't even have a plan in mind, just the temptation to fuck with people's heads for the sake of it. It's probably more amusing in thought than in practice, but still, consider the possibilities...

“Rush,” says Young, pleasantly enough. “What can I do for you?”

“You can put a guard on the chair to keep 'Nick' from ever touching it again.”

Young leans forward onto his folded arms and fixes him with a stare so unsurprised he gathers Young has been having similar thoughts himself. “Because he's going to use it to take over the ship?”

It's hard to tell what the man is thinking. It's frequently hard to tell _that_ he's thinking, but there have been enough times when he has taken Rush off guard with his insight for Rush to concede that Young has _something_ resembling intelligence. Flashes of the man he used to be, perhaps – the one O'Neill chose.

Rush is trying to adjust his paradigms for this. It's difficult.

“Exactly.”

_And to prevent him from visiting Mandy, because she's mine. Because he let her trapped consciousness fall into a star. He doesn't deserve..._

“You remember last time I tried to prevent you from doing whatever the hell you liked with the chair?”

It's a rhetorical question, obviously, because neither of them are ever likely to forget. Rush gives a quick smile in answer, because what happened was that he mapped out the limits of Young's ruthlessness. Young hasn't found the limits of his yet.

“You going to tell me what's going to stop something like that from happening again?”

“I am,” he says, sure and certain because no copy's ever going to best the real thing. “I'm on your side this time.”

Young laughs and leans back. Rush is bracing himself to be told that he's a lot of work, secretly almost reassured by the familiarity of it all, when the floor judders underneath him and the room goes dark.

The ribbons of blue light outside the windows have snapped. Only dust and distant stars visible. They have dropped out of FTL and they are nowhere near a scheduled stop.

Young's on the radio to the bridge, but Rush is already sprinting for the door because he knows, he _knows_ and he doesn't understand why he didn't think of this, why he didn't act earlier, how he could ever have become such a team player, such a docile little member of the flock. _Shite._

The door to the chair room still opens to his fist, but it's like running into liquid nitrogen in there. The air dries and stiffens the back of his throat as intense burning cold spikes through both lungs and down his spine. His thin clothes harden around him.

Underfoot, the floor is slippery with water-ice condensed out of the atmosphere. A layer of it glitters on the neural interface prongs embedded in Nick's temples. The blood sliding down his cheeks is slowing as it freezes. And this should not be possible, because he should need someone else there to operate the chair from the outside. That was how it had worked on alternate Destiny, when Nick asked him to do this for him. He should not be able to do it alone.

When has that ever stopped him?

The breath is solid in Rush's chest. His every exhale is a cloud of snow and every inch of his skin is pain. The flesh tries to crawl off his fingers at the thought of – what? He will have to open the back panel of the chair, yank out the power cables. He'll have to do it with his bare hands, risking his moist skin sticking to the intensely cold metal, pieces of his flesh flash freezing and pulling away as he works.

He hesitates. _Don't be a fucking coward._ It's this or give _Nick_ everything. The mission, the ship, the girl, everything.

A step closer and the agony is eviscerating. His eyes try to stream and lock open, frozen. Alarms blaring. He reaches out for the panel.

Something black around his chest, burning hot, and he's yanked backwards. He falls but he's held up, dragged, there's a force pulling him away and he can't seem to – thought is slippery, evasive. There was something he meant to do.

The door slams to in front of him. The heat of the corridor is unbearable, but his mind clears and he shakes himself free of Young – of course it was Young who, with typical shortsightedness, thought he needed to be rescued – and hits the door control with a blistered palm.

Nothing. Destiny has locked it down. It's too late.

Rush falls against the wall, panting through the ache in his lungs, tucking his numb hands under his armpits and feeling himself shudder.

“It's like what happened with Franklin,” says Young, all the little licks of his hair pointed with ice. He nods at the porthole in the door. Rush straightens up to look, but the window is iced over on the inside and he can't see a damned thing.

_Oh._

“There's no body left?”

It fits together suddenly into a picture he doesn't know how he missed. Oh, he's almost impressed. He has been underestimating himself.

“No. When we opened the door there was a cloud of cold mist and he was gone.”

Rush laughs, because he has to acknowledge that was well played. He never had liked the idea that _Nick_ had chosen to meekly accept death rather than face Young's wrath. That seemed far too pathetic for someone who was, for the most part, him.

“You think it's some kind of mechanical ascension?” Young asks, and there it is again, that sense that Young's actually been paying attention. “You said on the lizard planet that was one of your goals.”

Immortality, all the time in the world to learn everything that can be known? Why wouldn't he want that?

“If it is ascension, that's our problem solved,” he says, trying to stem his shivering. “'Nick' may want to take over the ship but the ascended community has a number of rules to enforce non-interference. He will be prevented.”

“You think?” Young's looking at him sideways, like he means to imply that all the versions of Rush are ungovernable and too clever for their own good. It's almost a compliment, and Rush finds himself pleased.

“Come on,” says Young and has the temerity to take him by the arm and pull. “We'll go to the mess and get several hot drinks in you. TJ can check you over. Then you can tell me what you're plotting. You _are_ plotting. I can tell.”

Rush is not plotting. 'Plotting' is such a negative word. He's thinking hard.

The mind and the body are linked, yes? That's what Chloe's near death by choking proves. Every cell in Nick's body must have been killed by the process that uploaded its energy to support the energy of his mind. So it can't matter, not really, whether the energy derives from a human body or an equivalent sized lump of rock.

Given enough energy to create the cells of a human being, and the data to structure it, why shouldn't a consciousness – lets be clear about this – why shouldn't Mandy's consciousness be able to build itself a new body out of the energy of the next passing star? There are staggering amounts of calculation involved, but if the ship can ascend _Nick_ it must be capable of that level of processing.

When he visits he can take a gift – he can give her the chance to live again, in a body to which no accident has ever happened. Her own walking, breathing, capable, youthful, beautiful body, a prison no more.

“For once it's nothing you need concern yourself with, colonel,” he says and accepts the mug of hot tea and the blanket that Becker offer him with pleasure. “It's all turning out for the best.”

~

And then it's four days later and he should not have said that. Four days during which members of the crew he didn't know existed have taken the chance to smile at him. He's not sure why this should be, but perhaps they're showing him how relieved they are that there's only one of him left. And perhaps that's supposed to be a nice thing.

He doesn't see how it can be, but fortunately he doesn't care either. Because he's replicated most of Nick's work, knows how to operate the chair on his own now. To avoid inadvertent ascension (because what's the point of knowing everything if you can't tell anyone?) he's created an interface out of the memories of a school trip to the Isle of Mull – one of the most miserable weekends of his life. He's standing now on a russet-brown hillside sloping down to a grey sea, waiting for Mandy to arrive.

The sky is grey as the sea, and long slanting drenching rain is sweeping across the island from shore to shore. The landscape is covered with scrubby little plants, its contours revealed as though it were painted in an atlas. He averts his eyes from the few splashes of yellow – he's never really liked gorse from having his face rubbed in its prickles so often as a child.

It's not really the best place for a romantic reunion, but he's an old fool and his heart is beating fast nevertheless.

“Doctor Rush?”

That's all it takes. He closes his eyes briefly to let the devastation bounce off, and then turns.

She looks like she belongs here, with her russet hair and the scar on her cheek like she's been bottled in a bar-fight. “Ginn? I'm looking for Doctor Perry. Is she not here?”

“You're the other one,” says Ginn, as though she's only just realizing this now. She hugs herself tight, though the rain is not dampening her. “Oh, I'm sorry.”

Apparently his question was not explicit enough. “Where is she?”

“She left, four days ago.” Ginn's trying not to look pitying but she's not doing a good job of it. “The other you invited her to go with him.”

She sits on the hillside, wrapping her arms around her knees as even the brown heather turns grey in Rush's sight. “So Mandy diverted the energy from the FTL drive, and used it to form the part of her essence that was missing in the absence of a body. She said she knew you would try to save her, when you had finished your work, but she preferred the version that put her first. Because he obviously loved her more than you. And she said you'll be all right, because you still have everything you need.”

He's not going to cry in front of this little girl. Not when he's only a mental projection of himself and doesn't have tiredness and hormones to blame. He's not going to-- Fuck it.

He turns away, covers his eyes with his hands and weeps, and part of him, just a little tiny part, still marvels at how real the warm salt liquid feels as it runs down his fingers.

Always did love that unsuspected cruelty in her, like a hypodermic hidden in a bunch of flowers. After Gloria took all his goodness with her, he never could have loved anyone who didn't have a hint of poison, just a hint of something with which he could punish himself.

“Do you think she'll descend again?” He dries his face on his sleeve – pointlessly, because rain is dripping from his hair and splashing from the end of his nose. “Visit sometimes?”

“I don't think so.” Ginn's face is tight. “She said any body would be a prison, after this.”

He's cold again. It's beginning to feel like he's always been cold. He tries to persuade himself that he's lost nothing he hadn't lost already. That it's not so bad to have lost it to himself. The reasoning is sound but the appropriate emotion just won't take.

“But I saw what she did,” Ginn continues, looking fierce and alone. “And after the next recharge _I'm_ going to descend, because _I've_ got something to come back for.”

Which is oddly hostile, but what can you expect from a pirate?

“Do you want me to tell Eli?”

“I already have.”

Some kind of bird shrieks in the grey dome of the sky overhead and a rivulet of cold white water tumbles down the hillside beneath the constant sssh of the rain. God he detests this place. Why on Earth did he come?

“Well then,” he says, “I mustn't outstay my welcome. There's plenty of work to be done.”

~

Five days later in the observation deck he's watching Eli and Ginn, both of them glowing, Eli unable to let go of Ginn's hand as they stand in the centre of a knot of congratulations – Chloe and Scott and Greer and Park and Volker and James all slapping backs. Camile at a distance with her hands on her hips, beaming. Even Brody smiling faintly as he hands out celebratory cups of lifewater.

Rush's back is to the universe, as he leans with his elbows behind him on the rail. He's not startled any more when Young slouches against the rail beside him. Young's also watching the distant celebrations with more than a touch of wistfulness.

“You OK?”

“Why wouldn't I be?”

Young mirrors his position so that he's no longer looking at Rush except out of the corner of his eye. He shrugs. “I'd have expected Dr. Perry to come back with her.”

Maybe she was right. Maybe he didn't love her, and it was just loneliness. Does it make it worse or better to wonder?

“She implied I put my work ahead of her. I didn't want to be with her enough.”

Young snorts, rather more vehemently than the confession merits. “I know that feeling," he says. "But you've got to do the work, right? Because the work's important.”

Rush tilts his head away to hide a smile. “Yes,” he feels vaguely comforted, surprisingly enough. “Understanding the universe, defending the defenceless – they're not things you can put aside until a better time. The work _is_ important, and I'm not ashamed to be the one who does it.”

Young gives him a sharp, startled glance, like he never expected to hear that from anyone. He looks thoughtful, but he just says “Game of chess?”

Rush laughs. “Don't flatter yourself,” and walks down to the party to get his mug of booze.

 


End file.
